Totenkopf-Tattooed Graham Platner Admired ‘German Helmets’ in WW2 Photo of Nazi-Allied Troops, Deleted Post Shows

Platner has spent the last six months trying to explain his Totenkopf, or Death’s Head, Nazi tattoo, which he wore for 18 years before having it covered up last October

Maine’s embattled Democratic Senate candidate, Graham Platner, praised a “cool pic” of Nazi-aligned troops aiming a rifle during World War II, zeroing in on their “German helmets” and weapon, in a now-deleted social media post, the Washington Free Beacon can reveal.

It’s not the first time Platner has shown enthusiasm for Nazi iconography. He notoriously had a chest tattoo of an SS “Totenkopf,” the skull and crossbones symbol worn by SS officers who manned the Nazi concentration camps.

In April 2019 a Reddit user shared an image of “Swedish Volunteer Battalion in a trench during The Continuation War, 1941.”

The image showed soldiers in German helmets during the conflict, pointing a Browning Automatic Rifle at the enemy over a defensive trench. A soldier gesturing to an enormous dog—which appears to be an Alsatian or German shepherd—dominates the foreground.

In a comment from his now-deleted Reddit account P-Hustle, Platner offered this response:

“German helmets and a [Browning Automatic Rifle]. What a cool pic.”

The soldiers in the picture are wearing the distinctive Stahlhelme, dimpled German helmets from World War II. They are aiming a Browning Automatic Rifle. The BAR was designed by an American, John Moses Browning, but some of the rifles were manufactured by a Belgian company in eastern Belgium. After the Nazis captured Belgium in 1940, they took control of the factory in question and manufactured Browning weapons for the Wehrmacht. The Swedes, who supplied many arms to Finland during the Winter War, also built their own variant of the BAR. The Nazis were also fond of captured Polish variants of the light machine gun and issued it to troops in large numbers.

The Continuation War was fought during World War II. Finland and Nazi Germany together fought against the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1944. The war is widely viewed as a continuation of the 1939 Winter War, during which the Soviet Union unsuccessfully attempted to conquer Finland, its much smaller neighbor.

The Continuation War was an opportunity for the Finns to take revenge—when Russia was substantially weakened by combat with the Nazis—and was declared on June 25, 1941. Coming just three days after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, the Finns and the Germans made for natural allies.

In addition to Hitler’s Wehrmacht, the Finns were joined by volunteers from Estonia and Sweden in their fight against the Soviets, who were deeply disliked by the Scandinavians.

Hundreds of thousands of Nazi troops ultimately fought in Finland at the height of the conflict.

The Continuation War ended in 1944. With the Germans in retreat, Finland signed the Moscow Armistice with the Soviet Union and the Western allies, a deal that left its sovereignty intact.

Platner’s fawning post about Nazi-allied soldiers with German-made helmets comes as he struggles to move past the controversy over his Totenkopf (German for “Death’s Head”) tattoo, which he wore on his chest for 18 years. In October 2025, two months after he announced his Senate campaign, Platner had the tattoo covered up with a tattoo of a “Celtic knot.” The candidate has claimed he didn’t realize his original tattoo’s Nazi origins, an assertion that has been increasingly contradicted by his friends. At least one Platner acquaintance told Jewish Insider he referred to the tattoo as “my Totenkopf,” and his Reddit post on the Continuation War suggests Platner had a keen interest in World War II military history, in particular with the German forces.

Platner has been harsher on American troops of today, criticizing them in now-deleted Reddit posts for being fat and lazy. He also accused Navy SEALs of padding their kill numbers by shooting civilians in Iraq.

The campaign has also been buffeted in recent days by revelations that he sent sexually explicit material to multiple women—an issue brought to the campaign’s attention by Platner’s wife.

Platner political adviser Morris Katz, a socialist wunderkind behind New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani (D.) and Nebraska independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn, has also sent nudes of himself to people, something he admitted in a 2019 blog post.